Is Converting Academia into a Business a Good Thing?

This is the question being asked by some in Massachuetts as the look at their Governor's new plan for higher education.

Massachuetts Gov. Mitt Romney's plan for higher education calls for substantially increasing tuition and fees, starkly differentiating research-oriented and vocationally oriented campuses, and grouping smaller campuses into regional networks more responsive to local industry's needs. In an attempt to strengthen its "flagship" campus, UMass-Amherst would grow bigger and, thanks to tuition and fee hikes as well as additional state funds, it would also grow richer.

Some say that such ideas exemplify an age when priorities in higher education are determined less by academic values than by the interests of multiple constituencies -- students, donors, corporations, politicians. In today's university, the student is a "customer" and the professor is an "entrepreneur." Each campus unit is a "profit (or loss) center," and each institution is busily promoting its "brand" and looking for its "niche market," whether in money capital or intellectual capital. "The University of California means business," says Richard C. Atkinson, that system's recently retired president, and he knows whereof he speaks.

A recent Boston Globe article says that what is troubling today is the single-minded fixation on marketplace and managerial values in colleges and universities. The winners are those with the skills valued by the market. The losers are advocates of the liberal arts, who can't prove their bottom-line value, and students from poor households, who are increasingly priced out of higher education.

Today's commercialized academia stems from myriad sources. Universities' costs have risen rapidly since the 1970s, partly because of the astronomical expense of biotech and high-tech research. Meanwhile, traditional sources of funding -- federal research support with few strings, as well as state dollars -- have been proportionately shrinking. These developments have forced universities to look elsewhere for funds. The impact is evident everywhere: in the rise of the so-called "practical arts" majors; universities' eight-figure investments in student perks; the growing dependence on deals with industry; and the belief, especially common during the go-go 1990s, that the Internet would be a gold rush for higher education as well.

A new generation of administrators, schooled in business practice, has acquired ever-greater power in the retooled universities. Those officials, veterans of government streamlining and corporate downsizing, have brought all the fashionable management and budgeting nostrums -- ideas like TQM (total quality management), revenue-center management, and emphasis on "core competencies" -- to higher education. The intention is to make universities run more like businesses, whether that means using financial aid to maximize revenues, skimping on the library and counseling center while spending money on gyms and rock-climbing walls, or hiring superstar professors to burnish a school's reputation while relying on adjuncts and other academic day laborers to shoulder the burden of teaching. Those borrowed innovations have been problematic because universities aren't like widget-making firms or the post office and organizational strategies can't be created by the logic used to assemble cars.

Does this sound familiar? It should because it is happening in every state across America. Stay tuned.